Overheard on campus

“My favorite memory of all time is the first snow freshman year. Fellow Northies and I charged South in a Snowball Civil War.”

Robyn Bahr ’10, writing on Twitter.com in response to a question posed on the college’s Twitter feed, “What’s your favorite memory of snow at Amherst?”

“Nobody, we’re told, would ever drop insurance because they have to cover various kinds of early childhood disabilities. Well, it turns out you may be right for 90 percent of them but you’re wrong for 10 percent of them. You add on another mandate, and it starts to snowball.”

Richard Epstein, James Parker Hall Professor of Law at the University of Chicago, speaking on campus on Sept. 26 about mandated health insurance. His talk was part of the Colloquium on the American Founding.

“He wanted to capture not the ugliness of it but the beauty of it. So, when you look at the work, you see the power, the grace and the line. ”

Billy McBride, assistant athletic director and director of diversity and inclusion, giving a 10-minute talk at the Mead Art Museum on two George Bellows lithographs of boxing matches

“To the extent that students and their parents are coming in more and more anxious, it is about questions of academic success and academic pressure and ‘How do I choose my future, in academic terms?’”

“The first thing I tried to do was Paul Prudhomme’s seafood gumbo. It was a complete disaster, and I dislocated a shoulder.”

Julie Powell ’95, author of the book Julie & Julia, talking about cooking in her Amherst dorm room, in an audio interview with New York Times editor Dan Saltzstein ’95 for the Amherst Reads online book club